Nice to see that the Downing Street Memo is getting the attention of the deniars of the right. Next they're going to tell us how we've always been at war with Iraq, and that Communist China has always been our friend. Anyway, those nutty sundaes quickly melt in the bright light of day, leaving just, well, sour milk and a bunch of nuts.

So here are some posts on the Downing Street Memo from the past few days. (Since many have already seen superblog commentary, I thought for some of these I'd offer some less-linked-to references.)

All this iffing and butting and hairsplitting, this "on the one hand this, on the other hand that," this pompous pretense of disinterest, this "now, now, let's just vet all this information properly before we get all worked up" that's going on in the US news media with regard to the Downing Street Memo...Well, it's all getting on my nerves severely. I think this speaks powerfully to the memo's authenticity and credibility. I agree with Atrios: The whole country should read it.

Some repeat that Bush has claimed the memo has been discredited, but I can't find out exactly who discredited it using what evidence. Others say that the matter already has been investigated. Yeah, it was investigated by the Bush Administration. Pardon me for being skeptical.

To say the DSM is not important because it is old news, is much like the White House response to the report that their paid ex-lobbyist had been rewriting scientific reports to make them more favorable to the oil industry. Their response was to say that such revisions are part of their "normal process."

So now we are to ignore the fact that the President of the United States started a war based on lies, because it is old news? The President lying is old news? No big deal?

I've put the various British memos into a timeline of events to better understand their context. The timeline draws from two published on the web, at Infoplease and Mideast Web. The memos come from Raw Story and the Times Online. You can also find copies now at downingstreetmemo.com. Since putting this timeline together has consumed most of my weekend, I don't have time right now to write much about the analysis, but the general conclusion is that the Bush administration seems to have made up its mind to get rid of Saddam Hussein by one means or another as of March, 2002, based on a number of factors including a belief that he had a WMD program and "unfinished business" from 1991 (as one of the papers discusses.) This may well be an example of a new-ish administration, flush from a previous victory in Afghanistan, making a policy choice and then selecting the facts to match....[timeline follows]

Suckers. But thatâ€™s what certain Right Wingers are wanting you to believe. Even a certain Noxiously Grating individual who comments here is trying to compare it to Raterhgate all because the reporter retyped the original memo and then turned it back to his source (in order to protect him). People like that want to claim thatâ€™s enough to make it a hoax.

Well leave it to the Big Brass Alliance to provide timely info to help set the record straight. If you want to read about the authenticity of the memo here are several links for you to have a gander at.

Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press -- no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers had decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine that, initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information that came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they found that the documents wouldn't go away, they acknowledged them more formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn't add up to much because they had run stories just like this back then themselves. Yawn.

This is, of course, something like the crude pattern that coverage in the American press has followed on the Downing Street memo, then memos.